Conglomerate 451 Preview and Interview

During this year’s Gamescom trade fair RuneHeads and 1C Entertainment were showcasing their procedurally-generated cyberpunk dungeon crawler Conglomerate 451. As a result, we can now watch this Gamereactor video interview with RuneHeads’ Moreno Lovato where he talks about the game’s cyberpunk setting and how it combines dungeon crawling with various management elements.

You’ll have to click the link above to watch the actual interview, but if you’d like something to read on top of it, you should direct your attention to this detailed RPG Watch preview that does a good job of explaining what the game is all about. An excerpt:

Each mission will have an objective that needs to be accomplished. This objective is different in each mission, but in the part of the game that I was shown, it was a simple mission to kill everyone. A mission is divided into two parts. First there is the city, which is not procedurally generated. You can explore the city and interact with NPCs. You can buy drugs that the clones can use and software, which can be used for drones, which can go on a mission as well. You can also hack one of the terminals, which is accomplished by completing a mini game. If you succeed to complete that mini game, you can unlock one of the perks that the console has to offer, like unlocking all doors in the dungeon you are about to enter. You need to complete the hack in a certain time as any access is continuously scanned. If you take too long the enemies are alerted and will unlock one perk against you, like them becoming more powerful, or locking your map, so that it becomes useless. To successfully hack a console the character who is doing the hack needs a hacking skill.

The effect of the weapons of your clones can be modified by placing special items that you can extract from devices located in the city, on your weapon. These items can have different effects and the amount that can be placed on the weapon depends on the level of the weapon, but ranges between two and five.

The second part of a mission is combat, which is turn-based. In the fight you can try to hit specific parts of the body of your opponent. If, for example, you hit the legs of an opponent, you could immobilize that opponent. There is also a combo between skills possible, like a skill that marks an enemy and a second skill that needs a marked enemy, which together can do quite some damage. This can also be done by different squad members, so the combo can be completed in one turn. There are in total 30 different types of enemies you get to fight in the game, so there should be sufficient variety.

During combat you can also hack enemies, and when they have a cybernetic implant, sabotage that implant. If someone for example has cybernetic eyes, you could make that character blind. The success of such an action is based on your hacking skills.

Whenever a character has very low health, a check is done at the start of the character’ s turn and when successful the character will be able to join combat again or otherwise the character will die. And as the game has permadeath, you want to prevent that from happening when it is one of your clones.

And finally, if you’ve been following Conglomerate 451’s early access journey, you may be interested in the patch notes for the latest early access update that added a number of hacking-related features to the game, and the hotfix that followed it.